


so circles round circle so

by bioluminesce



Category: Control (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:02:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22623751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bioluminesce/pseuds/bioluminesce
Summary: Jesse Dylan Faden does not want to be split in two. But the Oldest House wants what it wants. (Or, what if Dylan’s dream was true, and there was only ever one Faden child?)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 58





	1. Chapter 1

_“Examine dual quality of director position? Director-Board, Trench-Darling, Northmoor-[REDACTED], P6-P7.”_

_“School records in Ordinary show only one Faden child enrolled in public school, a fifth grade girl named Jessie Dylan. Note the slightly variant spelling. Because every adult in Ordinary disappeared, it is possible that the record was incorrect, or that Dylan Faden’s records existed elsewhere, or that the child was home schooled or kept from public record by the family for another reason. State records do not include her. Jesse Faden’s counselors indicate she has, from the moment of the incident, possessed a recollection of and a desire to find her brother.” Ordinary Expedition Report_

<You have met/split/served the same narrative purpose. Congratulations.>

* * *

You had strange dreams beside the projector. They oozed familiarity and strangeness, like riding in the back seat through a town you’d never been at night. In that town you recognized the brand names, but the topology looked all wrong. The dump smelled like wet garbage, but you got used to it. All of the kids did. Like passing through a film, it was, one narrow band of muck in your nose until it stopped. You would lay there and dream, alone or with the other kids: Neil, Jake, them. Remember them?  
  
Polaris came one day as a shimmer. You woke up and blinked, and she stayed just the same behind your eyes. She perched like a cat on a shelf. You kew the difference between real and play-pretend. She was observable, testable. When you told her you were going to generate some hypotheses to verify her reality, she offered to help.

* * *

“Dylan’s abilities are extraordinary, but uncontrolled. I… I tried to argue with the director that we can’t treat him like a trained dog. We don’t have to assert dominance on him; we have to give him a reason to want to get involved. We’re doing extraordinary work here, at the bureau, but he only sees us as a prison.

“Of course he would. We don’t let him run in the halls any more. We don’t let him talk to anyone any more. Sure, it was a distraction when people were talking to him while they were working, but they wanted to talk. Little kid who knew all of the safety protocols and words like “resonance” but was starting to forget what a school bell sounded like. Of course he was interesting, and interested. He was all of ours.

“Psychological development is hard to figure out at the best of times, and few enough of us are experts in that. This could all be exactly consistent with a kid who was taken away from his parents. Is that also consistent with an entity which, a year ago, didn’t exist?

“Or did he? Which one of them did?  
  
“That’s enough. That’s enough to record for today. How to balance remembering my own notes and keeping this inside this office I’ll never know. Even though that, maybe more than anything we research, is the real core of this job.”  
  
— Dr. Casper Darling

* * *

Director Zachariah Trench did not believe in the idea that whatever emotion he took into the room filtered into his phone conversation with the Board. Altered Objects were not magical caves from _Star Wars_ , reflecting only the hero’s heart. He could bring nothing that would influence the muted, tumbling words of the Astral Plane’s faceless overlord. So he didn’t bother hiding his anger when he called with less reason than usual, without a lead or a mission or anything except the burn in his throat and the days of frustrated searching.

“Where is she?”

The reply was, as always both unintelligible and plain. He heard nonsense noises, but somehow they became syllables he could understand. He could almost see the Board’s reply floating in front of him at the same time as that muffled, distant voice spoke in ripped-up, alien words.

<She is here/in the Bureau/being watched,> said the Board.

“Tell me something clear, for once!” It took effort to open his mouth, his teeth were grinding so hard, but when Trench yelled it felt good. “Why am I talking to a floating triangle if not because I know how to ask straight questions of the unknown? We have one Faden child. We need the other.”

<You have both/one/enough.>

“Enough.” Trench took a deep breath. _Get yourself under control. Make this worth it. Set aside the gradual slide into slow grief your home life has become and act like you’re at work._ Maybe he was getting somewhere. “Does that mean we should stop searching for the second child?”

<There is one/both/not enough.>

Trench cursed. Hesitated with the phone over the cradle like it was even _possible_ to hang up on the Board. He could slam the phone against the plastic hard enough for the crack to echo, and the line would still be open. The Board did not dignify condemnation with a reply. Trench caught his breath. “If we don’t find her, it might expose us all, you know. The Rangers might not be enough to protect us.”

It’s not a threat—it’s a cry for help—but he doesn’t mind that it might sound like one.

<Keep looking. You are getting warmer.>

He slammed the phone down and heard the plasticky echoes swallowed up by the glass box around him. The containment room for the phone smelled like dust and old leather. Like him, it was two generations old and getting older.

What grim thoughts for the day. He stood up, trying to look around for comfort but finding only the empty blackness of the firebreak. When he left the phone behind, the room behind him felt desolate, blasted, too open to be safe.

* * *

When Jesse Faden met her brother again, she had to transpose old memories over what he looked like fully grown. The underlying shape of his face was the same: her mother’s high cheekbones, her own bright eyes.

Seeing him felt like a shock. “Can you hear me?” Jesse said, voice plaintive to her own ears. “Do you know who I am?”

Polaris waited behind her eyes. Jesse expected her guardian spirit to react somehow to the momentous occasion of meeting her brother after his long imprisonment, but she was silent. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise: Polaris was nothing if not inscrutable. Selectively scrutable, perhaps. That made her similar to many things in the Oldest House.

Finally, Dylan spoke. His voice hissed, too. “You’re Dylan Faden’s …. sister.”

Weird. Not weirder than anything else she had seen in the Oldest House.

“Do you know who you are?” Jesse asked. _Please let him say yes. Please let him not be like all those people curving into the air up by the ceiling. Please let me not have been too late from the moment I stepped inside this place.  
  
Of course, none of this is going to be easy._

His face looked slack in a way that bothered her. Jesse didn’t think she had ever seen him wear this expression before. Even if he was still a child, she wouldn’t have recognized it.  
  
They talked for a while, about who he was and how he became this way, although his muddled answers did not satisfy her. He had sunken into the squalor of the Hiss, if not totally fused with it, and Jesse wasn’t interested in that.

She became more interested when he told her the projector let the Hiss in, and when he blamed the FBC for it.  
  
After that part of the conversation, something changed.  
  
The world snapped like a worn rubber band, and now Jesse looked out through the glass at herself. The reflections had inverted. It powerfully realigned what she thought she always wanted. She stared now at answers. She looked at _the director_ , the person who could let her see every secret, open every file, swipe through every door, including that one at the center of Executive that lead straight to the Board.

Except at the same time, she looked at the newest employee on payroll. She looked at the janitor who didn’t speak half the language. She looked at a blank wall, waiting to carve her name into it.

Jesse blinked.

She came out of Dylan’s consciousness like a person rising out of the sea.

 _What was that?_ She was so used to confiding only in Polaris, she didn’t want to speak the words. Nevertheless:  
  
“What was that?”  
  
“I don’t know, sister. You tell me. You’re the one with all the power.”

She couldn’t deny that.

“I’ll be back, Dylan,” she said. “I’ll find our answers.”

“I hope you do,” he said. When he relaxed back into the curve of the Hiss it looked natural, not horrible.

Jesse bit the inside of her cheek and grimaced as she turned to leave. Had this conversation helped her at all? Why did it feel like she was still two people, one inside the glass and one outside of it? At least she didn’t feel any urge to start chanting the Hiss’ mantra. Regardless of this new, strange perspective, he had told her to go to the Prime Candidate Wing and see what happened next. That, she had no doubt she could achieve. The dual vision was just one more mystery among all the rest.  
  
What if their roles had been reversed? Would it have been easier to travel the country as a man who looked like Dylan?  
  
Just one more mystery. Still, it was one that gnawed at her.


	2. Chapter 2

Government agents prowled through the dump.

The sun was setting in a bank of red clouds. Jessie Dylan Faden crawled into the back of the rusting car and thought about her family. The town had gone so quiet. No amount of records, cassette tapes, CDs, could fill up this silence. She strained her eyes and ears, wishing she could hear anything other than the people in crinkling plastic suits pawing through the trash. They reminded her of the government agents from _E.T._ or _The_ _X-Files_ , the ones who came at night when everything was bad and disappeared the evidence. Except Polaris was not a rubber alien, could not be taken away into a terrible, plastic-lined tunnel. She lived in Jessie’s head, and spoke in a wordless voice that could not be denied.

When Jessie Dylan Faden became two people, two children stumbling out of the Slide Projectorlike an army gaining a deserter, Polaris “went” “with” “Jesse”.

Dylan Faden became evidence, disappeared, his now-sister’s memories of TV shows slowly fading from his mind.  
  
Jesse Faden, older, thief of years and never knowing she had done it, got away.

* * *

Jesse swept into the conference room. Lately she felt light on her feet, the powers she had gained turning even her earthbound steps into a swift and momentous gait. Emily Pope looked up from under the shadow of the pyramid motif.

“I have the documents you requested, about yourself and Dylan,” Emily said alertly, pushing the manila file across the table.

“Give me the short version.”

Emily sat up straighter. “Trench and Darling both investigated the possibility that there had only been one … uh … Faden sibling. One of you. Federal records show only one. Jesse Dylan Faden, just like Dylan said. The spelling varies. But Trench didn’t sound … convinced.”

Strange. Jesse resisted the urge to place her hands against her own stomach, to prove that she existed. “How so?”  
  
“It’s one of those documents he made where he makes leaps of logic. I’d suspect he was hiding something from the Bureau, but … that’s not how the directorship works. I think it’s just a sign of how he thinks.”

“Okay.” Jesse took a deep breath. “I still need to chase the Hiss out. Is there any … risk of Dylan and I somehow coming back together? Or some kind of situation where I’m erased and he’s the only one left?”  
  
“It seems very unlikely. You’ve done so much in the House already. You’ve experienced the first … thirty or so things I’d have suggested we test for if you were worried about that.”  
  
“Okay. Thanks.”

Emily hesitated. Jesse noticed abruptly that she herself was still standing, as if about to flee. Or like a boss too busy for her employee.  
  
“I thought you’d react differently,” Emily said.

“How so?” Jesse took a deep breath and sat down.  
  
“Sometimes I don’t know how to say things in a … nice way. People find facts uncomfortable. I can see how this one could. Not that I think it is … See? I don’t know what to say. Let’s go back to the facts.”

Now Jesse did flatten her palms against her stomach. “It’s an uncomfortable situation. I don’t remember anything in my life that sounds like what he’s saying. It’s weird, but weird in a different way than all the rest of this. Maybe weirder. But you’re just the messenger. I don’t blame you for doing your job. A job you’re good at.”

Even as she was trying to soothe Pope, another corner of Jesse’s mind was having a different conversation. _Polaris?  
  
A shimmer of … amusement, maybe, that rare feeling of lightness Polaris expressed when she knew the two of them were on the right track. What did it mean that there might be_ three _of them?  
  
What do you think is the truth? _Jesse silently asked Polaris.  
  
The blue shimmer shifted. Jesse’s perception rotated as if Polaris’ shape was a wheel and her awareness sat at the edge of it. Blue lensing pointed back the way she had come, past the conference room door.  
  
 _But that could mean anything,_ Jesse thought.  
  
More immediate was the sense of reassurance. They weren’t doomed.

“I can keep being the messenger,” Emily said. “There are some of Darling’s papers left to go through. He had a habit of squirreling them away. He took a lot of his most important notes on film and just … left them around. Very audio learning style, I guess.”  
  
“Oh, I’ve seen some of those. I think he was expecting an audience even when he wasn’t on a soundstage."  
  
Emily gave a small laugh.  
  
“Thanks for your help. I’ll be back.” Jesse waved as she left, her feet easily finding that up-tempo gait, hoping that she hadn’t just spoken a lie. If she died, would Dylan die too? Or would he barge in here and attack?

Jesse glanced at the doors to the room where Dylan was being held on her way out of Executive. It was hard for her to fathom what Emily had told her. What did it matter if she and her brother had been one person as children? It wasn’t the strangest thing she had heard today.  
  
Knowing that they might have split apart, in some kind of phenomenon that even the FBC had almost missed, didn’t erase Jesse’s memories of her own, singular life. She was on her own now, and had been since Ordinary. She had the bad memories of night bus stops to prove that. Dylan had said he had dreamed their duality, but he had dreamed numerous strange things. Were they all true, in one way or another? Or just this one? Was the oil slick miasma of the Hiss like the fog at the edge of dreams, preventing Jesse from getting a good look at anything?

* * *

Jesse stood in the wreckage of a cardboard town and remembered what Emily Pope had told her. She thought about picking up the bakelite phone. If she had taken it out of that room, could she call from here? She wanted to ask someone, anyone, questions, but couldn’t think of how to phrase them. If the Board was psychic, it was very conditionally so. _Architecturally_ , she reminded herself. The Board, whether or not it was the same kind of being or structure or intellect as the Oldest House, presented itself as an inscrutable geometric shape. The House was just a more complex version of the same thing.

How could she use _shapes_ to her advantage to try to figure out whether the House itself had a stake in all this? She wouldn’t have felt the need to try such a strange Hail Mary gesture if what Emily said hadn’t stuck so thoroughly in her mind. Jesse had come all this way to find Dylan. What did it mean that they might have been living in some kind of sympathetic simultaneity all along?  
  
As she chided her inner monologue for starting to sound like Emily, she folded her tall body into the half-scale doorway of a neighbors’ house. The facsimile of her childhood home had been destroyed in her gunfight with the Hiss. She didn’t remember whether she or one of them had done it. Now, white flakes littered the floor where it had been. She crouched inside the house, thinking about the shape of it inside the larger, ever-shifting shape of the House. Waiting for revelation.

It didn’t come. Polaris shimmered gently behind her eyes in doglike reassurance. Only the same old feelings of determination came to Jesse’s mind. Her cause in life had been to find the FBC, and to find her brother. Now, maybe, she wanted to re-shape the FBC so this never happened again. The fire of that motivation refused to die, no matter how dreamlike the world around her. No matter how many Matryoshka houses.  
  
Eventually, her back started to twinge and she left.

* * *

Jesse approached the end of the road. Dylan floated in the Hiss’ wicked curve, no longer attacking the Board but still wracked by the force that compelled him. Red fog swirled around them in the Astral Plane.

“Dylan!”  
  
“It’s too late, sister.” He spoke absently, without looking at her.

“I know about your dream.”

She thought she saw his eyelids flutter. She levitated across the last few feet to him, already putting out of her mind the Hiss she had killed on the platforms behind her, the burning smell of their gunfire.

“Listen to me. Just this time,” Jesse said. She glanced around the small platform, wary of more enemies. Obsidian voidstuff glittered under her feet. “Maybe we were the same person once. Maybe the House split us apart, or made us think we were always together in the first place. But that’s not what matters right now! What matters is that I came all this way to find _you_ , my brother, because you’re important to me. Isn’t that enough? Aren’t you going to let me help you?”

“No! It isn’t enough!” Dylan’s voice was filled with vitriol even as his face retained its slack, possessed expression.“Families are split up all the time. Siblings separated, parents separated. You didn’t have to travel all the weird byways of the country to learn that, Jesse. And none of that erases what the FBC did to me.”

“I’m not erasing it. I can’t. You’ve already done the work. Already guaranteed that the FBC will remember you! P6 _and_ P7 are going to be in the records forever. But we can make new records! I’m not like Trench, Dylan. I wouldn’t keep a kid in here for years because of some formula.”

“Wouldn’t you? You don’t know what the Board is. Neither do I. None of us do. What you want right now might not make any difference to what it turns you into in a year.” His voice turned wheedling, then rose again into a snarl. “At least I know what the Hiss wants!”

He turned, further contorting his body. She could see the bottoms of his feet and the backs of his hands at the same time. He stretched out toward the distant monolith shape of the Board, and something near Jesse’s Polaris-sense writhed.  
  
She pressed her hands onto either side of Dylan’s face.  
  
 _You remember._

 _Being a united person again doesn’t guarantee total mental balance. You’re still a child, still figuring out social cues and stairs and what you like. But you aren’t a blank slate. You remember the wet grass under the trees by the main road. Old-fashioned neon signs outside a barbershop. You remember walking in with your father’s hand around yours. The interior smells like shaving cream and wax.  
  
But you were _Jesse _.You remember that too, schoolyard grass under your fingers and astronomy books with small words and big letters. Is it time that confuses the memories, or something else?  
  
Something else.  
  
You remember splitting apart.  
  
The confused, dry-mouthed fear of it. Too strange a situation to cause you to cry. It feels more utterly bewildering than frightening. Perhaps no one else on earth has experienced their consciousness suddenly jumping to another life. Even single-digit years pile on like heavy coats._

_You see yourself, hot tears welling in your eyes but not falling. Which one of you did you turn to look at? It doesn’t matter. You don’t remember. You’re looking at the other one with awe and love, because they know your entire history in a way no one else can. Your history smooths into them like one river meeting another. The waves and the rocks are turbulent, but the exact place where the two meet is impossible to distinguish. You are two features of the same landscape._

_You are filled with familial love for your sibling, whoever they are._

Jesse’s awareness snapped back to the present.

She was back in the House, the possibility of breach and death and invasion looming over her. (Both of her.) The invasion had gotten inside of her already, its spores in her lungs. Projections blooming into the red, half of her fighting and half of her surrendered days ago. She couldn’t describe it any other way if she tried. It had all played out like an academic argument within one head as much as it was a fight between two individual people.

Regardless, Jesse won.  
  
Jesse had already won, by thinning out the Hiss soldiers and acquiring Objects of Power and winning the glacially slow regard of the Board. There was no universe, no slide, in which she did not bring Dylan down from that pillar and her newfound, reinvigorated connection with Polaris did not return her to the earthly plane. She felt another flash of awareness. She lost time.  
  
Her eyes were tightly shut. Her shoulders hit the ground hard enough to bruise. Then the back of her head knocked against the floor. Not nearly as much pressure as she expected against her hips.  
  
She blinked her way out of Dylan’s perspective and came to in Executive.  
  
People crowded around her, Arish pushing the flat of a gun back against a zealous Ranger. At first, the only thing she could see of Emily was the persistently bobbing top of her head as she tried to elbow into the circle.

“It’s okay,” Jesse shouted, louder than she expected to. Better too loud than too soft. She used her director voice. “He’s out.”

She knew that before she saw Dylan, his back to her, lying on the floor in the wrinkly P6 sweatsuit. A flash of triumph— _I, Jesse, am the one who is still conscious_ —helped her gain enough energy to rise to her feet. _I won.  
  
_ Her executive team swarmed around her like one body.

* * *

_I still remember the bitterness he felt. It wasn’t irrational. He had reason to fight. When he wakes up, we need to have a conversation about what he did with that motivation._

_I haven’t felt any more of the psychic connection to him. Polaris is secure. Dylan might not be. But I can’t control him. Maybe he was horrified by the idea that I might take over his thoughts and erase him, just as I was afraid of the same thing._

_Emily and I will codify protections for him. I think we can take care of them for ourselves.  
  
I hope he felt some of my thoughts about him while we were in there, too. It could be a relief to both of us. And it might make whatever happens next easier.  
  
— Director Jesse Faden_


End file.
